MEDALS: Sunday, August 24, 2014: NEWS. (Left) Enquirer reporter, Cliff Radel, talks with John E. Reis (seated) and explains the meaning of each military medal that belonged to his father after they were found in a dumpster but later reunited with the Reis family. The Enquirer/ Amanda Rossmann(Photo: Amanda Rossmann, The Enquirer)

Nobody knows exactly how the soldier's medals landed in a Dumpster way on the other side of town.

But everyone agrees Shawn Harvey did the right thing by Dumpster-diving for them in Amelia. Completing his good deed, he recently reunited the medals, still carefully preserved in their original glass-framed shadowbox, during a tearful exchange with the soldier's West Side family.

"What kind of a pinhead would throw away a man's medals?" Harvey fumed after slamming the door of his pickup in the parking lot of Mount Carmel VFW Post 9630. The concrete-block building's entrance sports a "Proud to be a Veteran" message painted next to the image of a bald eagle keeping watch over a waving Stars and Stripes.

"I'm not a veteran," declared the lanky 49-year-old. "But my dad is. So are my uncles, great uncles, grandfather and brother. Treating someone's medals like they are garbage ... "

He took a deep breath to calm down.

"They might mean nothing to the guy who threw them away," he muttered in an angry whisper.

"But they mean something to somebody."

After making his discovery, Shawn called The Enquirer. He wanted to find who earned the medals and what war they came from. He hoped "to meet this man's loved ones." I did some detective work and helped him realize all of the above.

A car mechanic by trade, Shawn went Dumpster diving – "I hate to admit this, but I am unemployed and I do this from time to time to supplement my income" – for a man he never met, John M. Reis. The World War II Army private volunteered to fight at the age of 27 and died in 1994 still working at the age of 77.

Shawn didn't do it for Reis. At least, not entirely. He also did it for every man ... and every woman.

"Anyone who served our country," he said, "doesn't matter when, doesn't matter who, doesn't matter what he or she did in the war, deserves respect. You just don't throw medals away."

John M. Reis' children – his 67-year-old daughter, Kathy Verity, and son, 59-year-old John E. Reis – a daughter-in-law, two granddaughters, one grandson-in-law and a great granddaughter waited for Shawn as he approached from the parking lot.

He slipped the shadowbox from a plastic bag and cleared a lump from his throat.

"I want to present this out of respect to your family," Shawn said, struggling to keep his emotions in check. "What happened to it was total disrespect. This man served our country. I couldn't let it go. I wanted it to go to the right place."

That said, he handed the framed medals, ribbons, pins and patches to John and Kathy. She cried. Shawn gave her a hug. John sat in stunned silence. Shawn patted him on the back.

"By the looks of these medals, he was a hard-fighting man," Shawn said.

"He went through hell," John said.

But, as with so many veterans, he never told a soul.

What his loved ones know about what he did in the war comes from his medals and one sheet of yellowing paper, his discharge papers.

John M. Reis, by his own admission, was no big-deal war hero. He didn't earn a Purple Heart or medals of valor.

He was, instead, one of those lower-case, nothing-fancy heroes, an everyman just like the 16 million other American everymen who fought in World War II. He enlisted and took up arms. As his medals show, he achieved marksman status with a carbine as well as a rifle and pistol – all in defense of his country

Pvt. Reis spent 22 months in war-ravaged Europe. During his time overseas, he drove a 2½-ton truck an average of 300 miles a day on paved and unpaved roads. As his discharge papers noted, the five-foot, seven-inch, 130-pounder "made minor repairs on vehicle." Of course he did. The Army expected that of guys like him, an experienced civilian trucker. That's how an Army keeps moving. The truck breaks down, the driver fixes it. Off you go. On to victory.

After the war, he laid down his weapons and came home to Cincinnati, to his wife, his sweetheart, Betty. They had married in the summer of 1941, six months before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war. She was the sister of a guy he knew in Clifton.

Their picture, a sepia-toned snapshot taken just before he left for Europe in 1944, rests in the shadowbox. The photo shows them standing very close together. She's in clothes that say she's about to go shopping Downtown. He's in uniform, marksman medals pinned to the chest of his Army jacket.

"That's mom and dad, dead on," John said as he wiped his eyes. "An 8-by-10 copy of that photo used to be in their house in Westwood."

Kathy added: "If there's a woman standing close to my dad, that would be my mom. My dad never stood that close to another woman."

After the war, John M. Reis returned to the line of work he followed before the war, driving a truck and making deliveries. He started working at 14. "That's how old he was when he signed himself out of the orphanage," Kathy said. "His mom didn't want to take care of him. His dad couldn't. So, he went into an orphanage in Anderson Township. When he turned 14, out he went, finding work driving a motorcycle and delivering dental supplies."

He made deliveries in the Army, too. His cargo consisted of troops assigned to the 106th Infantry "Golden Lion" division. His Golden Lion shoulder patch appears on his photo in the shadowbox. The patch itself is under the same glass.

Reis trucked those men to the biggest and bloodiest battle Americans fought in World War II, the Battle of the Bulge. During the dead of winter, from Dec. 16, 1944, to Jan. 25, 1945, the battle raged across the Ardennes forest of Belgium and Luxembourg. The German army attacked the allies at a bulge in their lines, giving the battle its name. Even though he never talked about it, surviving this savage fight must have been a defining moment in the life of this 28-year-old truck driver.

For 28-year-olds today, the battle of the bulge is a struggle to avoid a beer belly.

But for 610,000 American soldiers of John M. Reis' generation, the Battle of Bulge was a fight for their lives. Half of the Golden Lion division was captured and sent to German prisoner-of-war camps. The battle claimed nearly 40,000 lives on both sides, including 19,000 Americans.

Reis shared just one memory of this battle. He told it to his son. Not his daughter. When she asked about the war, he always said: "You don't need to know stuff like that."

He never mentioned the battle by name, telling his son about the time his convoy stopped for the night. There was no time to set up tents. "So, they just threw their sleeping bags where they could. He laid his under a big old tree," his son said. "When he woke up, he was buried in snow. He was a very sound sleeper. If someone hadn't tripped over him, he told me, he would have been left behind."

A sudden night-time snowfall occurred during the Battle of the Bulge. But John M. Reis never verbally put those two occurrences together.

Nor did he talk about how he avoided being captured by the Germans. Seven thousand members of the Golden Lion division became prisoners of war. One of them was Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote about the horrors of war in his novel, "Slaughterhouse Five," after the war.

When remnants of the 106th regrouped, they traveled in 2½-ton trucks driven by Pvt. Reis and his fellow truckers to defend the town of St. Vith. For five days the Americans held this strategic crossroads. That was enough time to ruin the Germans' timetable for victory and help the Americans win the Battle of the Bulge and, ultimately, the war.

Pvt. Reis came home in 1946 and pursued, as his namesake son said, "a life that was normal." He went to work. So did Betty. He drove trucks. She worked in the University of Cincinnati's cafeterias. They had three children. Their first, a boy, died 90 minutes after being born. Kathy came next. Then John.

They moved from Over-the-Rhine to Clifton and then to Westwood. He remodeled their house from top to bottom and worked on their cars.

"He could fix anything," Kathy recalled. "I worked with him on some projects. I was his go-fer. We were pals. My mom was my buddy. She was still going places with me until she died last year at the age of 94."

By that time, the medals had vanished from Betty's house. John thought Kathy had them. She thought he did. He had one of his dad's two dog tags.

"I thought I had his marksman medal," John said as he looked down at the shadowbox.

He does now.

As three generations of John M. Reis' family gathered around Shawn Harvey, they shared their memories of a man who, in the eyes of history, would be considered a run-of-the-mill G.I. – which stands for General Issue. Still, the talk kept turning back to the man and the medals and ribbons in the shadowbox his son held with an iron grip.

Shawn mentioned how he saw them being dropped in the Dumpster.

"A guy was cleaning out his storage unit near mine. I drove off to get a splash of gas in my truck. When I came back, he was gone. I looked into the Dumpster and found the medals in a Rubbermaid tub. Had that guy still been there, he would be in line for a butt-whuppin.' "

John smiled. "Had we been there," he said, "you would have had to take a number and get in line."

Everyone laughed. Then they went back to gazing at the medals and ribbons, patches and pins. One for good conduct. One for winning the war in Europe. Two for marksmanship.

Unlike the soldiers who earned them, none of these mementos of war has an expiration date. Still, how long must they be held dear? Do they belong only to the soldier who received them? After he's gone, can they be like old soldiers and just fade away?

To Pvt. Reis' family and to Shawn Harvey, those medals help define a humble, quiet man. They give him his due as a man who served.

Dick Cole served, too. He is one of the four remaining Doolittle Raiders, 80 fliers who stunned Tokyo with a surprise bombing raid from an aircraft carrier in 1942. Approaching his 99th birthday on Sept. 7, the Dayton, Ohio, native has been honored with a chest-full of medals topped by the Distinguished Flying Cross. Congress continues to debate whether to honor the Raiders with a gold medal.

Cole can take the medals or leave them. "Giving someone a medal for serving his country is like giving a medal to a guy for grabbing a hose when his house is on fire," he said during a recent visit to Cincinnati.

"You don't serve for the medals. You serve to protect where you live."

Cole listened to the story of Shawn Harvey and Pvt. Reis' medals as he put away his breakfast dishes at his home north of San Antonio.

"Those medals were awarded in good faith for his service," Cole said.

"Should they ever be thrown away? Can they ever be thrown away?" he wondered.

He thought and thought as he put another dish away with a soft clatter.